Manuscrit inédit sur l'idéologie bourgeoise et la Révolution française

Autograph manuscript of 12 pages on squared sheets, written in blue ink, with numerous passages underlined.
A previously unpublished set of reflections by Jean-Paul Sartre on social structure and bourgeois ideology, probably written in 1952 as part of a projected screenplay on the revolutionary period. This series of interior dialogues on the nature of individual and collective power constitutes an early draft of the ideas later developed in his 1960 masterpiece, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Through the example of the French Revolution and the Terror, Sartre questions the role of the citizen and of property, drawing on the writings of Kant, Marx, Rousseau, Hobbes, Saint Paul and Luther.

This group of leaves shows numerous similarities in both content and form with two manuscripts dating from before 1953, now preserved at the University of Austin, Texas (the manuscript entitled “ Liberty – Equality ”, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center collection) and at the University of Ottawa (the manuscript “ Screenplay / Joseph Le Bon ”). A reference in our manuscript to a study by Jean Vialatoux on Hobbes, reissued in 1952, further supports its dating to that year.
Throughout these pages one recognizes Sartre’s characteristic note-taking style, composed of striking assertions and flashes of thought attacking social systems and structures: “ for the bourgeois can derive the sacred only from himself ”, “ One is sacred insofar as one is the slave of the sovereign who defends each of his slaves against the other slaves ”. It is an opportunity for the philosopher to deploy numerous lines of reasoning and syllogisms, and for the reader to follow in detail the course of his intellectual process:
“ What then is the sovereign in relation to me ? 1/ My own will, but alienated. It is returned to me as other. That is to say, I re-interiorize it in the form of command, duty and law. Example: I own and cultivate my land. I give my right to the sovereign. He confirms me in this possession ”.
Through a series of tests applied to ideological assertions, Sartre analyses the phenomenon of the devolution of power and the place of individual will, thereby dismantling the mystique of the State of which Hobbes was the great theorist.
The early 1950s correspond to a period of great productivity for the writer, who stages his scandalous play The Devil and the Good Lord and mobilizes for the release of Henri Martin, imprisoned for his action against the Indochina War. In 1952, he devotes himself to biographical projects with the publication of his Saint Genet, and also begins work on an unfinished screenplay about the life of a little-known revolutionary, the Montagnard Joseph Le Bon, intended to be “ a sort of filmed philosophical biography rethinking the data emphasized by the historiography of the Revolution ” (Philippe Gilles, Construction du personnage et argumentation philosophique (sur un scénario inédit de Jean-Paul Sartre)), the drafts of which are now preserved at the Universities of Ottawa and Austin.
These handwritten notes probably form part of a body of reflections preliminary to the writing of this screenplay, with substantial sections devoted to an anthropological and particularly innovative approach to the Terror, aiming to understand the emergence of violence in History (in the manuscript, the “ germ of Terror ”):
“ There is terror when pessimism turns into optimism without the original conception of man being changed. Then Evil becomes a parasitic thicket to be cleared away in order to recover the good. Evil is negating. Otherwise, if we start from the idea that Man is metaphysically evil as the result of a free act from which one cannot return, there is pessimism and not terror. ”
Beyond the revolutionary period addressed in a few pages, this manuscript reflects the underlying concerns and internal debate of Sartrean philosophy, between individual and collective, real and ideal, sovereign and masses. Indeed, these notes already contain the main themes of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, his monumental study which, after Being and Nothingness, provides the social dimension of his thought and required many years of maturation. In the manuscript written several years before its publication, one finds the same endeavour to construct an anthropology inspired by Marxism, as Sartre gradually draws closer to the French Communist Party after a long period of estrangement, and in the same year publishes his laudatory series of articles in Les Temps modernes entitled “ The Communists and Peace ”. A true “ archaeology ” of social dialectics, these notes revisit and confront with great critical acumen the theories of his predecessors, foremost among them Rousseau and Hobbes:
“ Let us not forget that Hobbes’s system is engendered by fear (fear is my passion, he says). He calls for peace. But civil peace (against civil war). The point is therefore to live in security. ‘To fear nothing from other men, to acquire without rivals, to preserve without envy’. The mercantilist peace of the English bourgeois ”.
One also notes the far more positive influence of the Social Contract, cited several times and to which Marxism itself is largely indebted: “ But in Rousseau the sum of acts of commitment is made to a being at first purely fictitious and non-existent, but which ‘at the instant (of the pact)’ is born, receives its unity, its common self, its life, its will ”. Moreover, Sartre insists forcefully on the appeasement of the masses and the passivity that seem to be the immutable conditions of the social dialectic he condemns:
“ The person of the Monarch (or of the assembly), being also an individual person, cannot identify with a pure will of the general. No doubt it embodies the wills of all, but it is also the will of one alone. And as such it can come and seize me in my particularity and my life as such. If I alienate myself to a person, I am a slave. ”
These working notes for an unfinished cinematic project are also of capital importance for the genetic study of Sartre’s philosophical work, through their explicit kinship with the Critique of Dialectical Reason. At the crossroads of sociology and philosophy, these still unpublished pages by Sartre fill the gaps in Marxist philosophy and lay the very foundations of a new anthropology.